Hearing aids have been developed to ameliorate the effects of hearing losses in individuals. Hearing deficiencies can range from deafness to hearing losses where the individual has impairment of responding to different frequencies of sound or to being able to differentiate sounds occurring simultaneously. The hearing aid in its most elementary form usually provides for auditory correction through the amplification and filtering of sound provided in the environment with the intent that the individual can hear better than without the amplification.
Various hearing aids offer adjustable operational parameters to optimize hearing and comfort to the individual. Parameters, such as volume or tone, may easily be adjusted, and many hearing aids allow for the individual to adjust these parameters. It is usual that an individual's hearing loss is not uniform over the entire frequency spectrum of audible sound. An individual's hearing loss may be greater at higher frequency ranges than at lower frequencies. Recognizing these differentiations in hearing loss considerations between individuals, it has become common for a hearing health professional to make measurements that will indicate the type of correction or assistance that will improve that individual's hearing capability. A variety of measurements may be taken, which can include establishing speech recognition scores, or measurement of the individual's perceptive ability for differing sound frequencies and differing sound amplitudes. The resulting score data or amplitude/frequency response can be provided in tabular form or graphically represented, such that the individual's hearing loss may be compared to what would be considered a more normal hearing response. To assist in improving the hearing of individuals, it has been found desirable to provide adjustable hearing aids wherein filtering parameters may be adjusted, and automatic gain control (AGC) parameters are adjustable.
With the development of microelectronics and microprocessors, programmable hearing aids have become well known. It is known for programmable hearing aids to have a digital control section which stores auditory data and which controls aspects of signal processing characteristics. Such programmable hearing aids also have a signal processing section, which may be analog or digital, and which operates under control of the control section to perform the signal processing or amplification to meet the needs of the individual.
There are several types of hearing aid programming interface systems. One type of programming system includes a custom designed stand-alone programmer that is self-contained and provides programming functions known at the time of design. Stand-alone programmers tend to be inflexible and difficult to update and modify, thereby raising the cost to stay current. Further, such stand-alone programmers are normally designed for handling a limited number of hearing aid types and lack versatility. Should there be an error in the system that provides the programming, such stand-alone systems tend to be difficult to repair or upgrade.
Another type of hearing aid programming interface is a programmer that is designed to install into and become part of a host computing system. Hearing aid programmers of the type that plug into host computers are generally designed to be compatible with the expansion ports on a specific computer. Past systems have generally been designed to plug into the bus structure known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA). However, the ISA expansion bus is not available on many host computers. For example, most laptop computers do not have an ISA expansion bus. Further, plugging cards into available ISA expansion ports requires opening the computer cabinet and appropriately installing the expansion card.